Old Havana

. . . pongee-colored girls in white dresses the sun 
shone through in multiple haloes 
where they lay alongside streets like sofas 
reading José Martí behind potted ferns 
in avenue-knolls paved with Key West grass 
and long-leaved tobacco shaved and scented like bark strips.

I dreamt a UCLA campus built by descendants of conquistadores:
Churriguerra architects and new-freed import-labor, 
not the mystical-realism of material-less materialism in La Habana Vieja 
in the hands of UNESCO-planners, waiting wanly 
at the end of a totalitarian century breeding slaves 
freed into nightmare-bondage to an Ever-Glorious Future.

—Anthony Kerrigan